FTC Gives Apple, Facebook a Pass

Apple, Google and Facebook — with the help of a lot of lobbying — managed to fight off some tough new regulations on kids’ online privacy.

The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday finally updated its aging rules governing how kids’ data is collected on the Internet. The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act was passed by Congress in 1998, well before smartphone apps or social networks took off.

The law’s rules will now be tailored cover those areas as well, meaning apps and social networks will have to get parental consent to gather data from children. But in a retreat from a draft that was released last summer, the FTC won’t hold app stores like those run by Google and Apple responsible for privacy violations by the games and other software that is sold there.